Thorn said nothing.
“I’m not leaving until I get your word. I won’t have that on my conscience. You understand me? If I have to, I’ll chain you to a palm tree till this thing blows over.”
“You couldn’t manage that.”
“Don’t try me, Thorn.”
Thorn stared into Sugarman’s eyes and said nothing.
“Okay, if that’s how it is, then I’m staying.”
Thorn turned to watch the haze moving past the dock lights, teased into action by a draft off the Atlantic.
“Go on your trip, Sugar. Make your girls happy, hike the canyon, take some snapshots, buy them all the pizza they can eat. Tell them Uncle Thorn sends his love.”
“Is that your promise? You’ll not harm yourself?”
“Go on, Sugar. Be with your family. I just need to get rid of a few things. Simplify, start fresh. Really. I’ll be fine. Go.”
Sugarman studied Thorn’s eyes for a minute.
“Okay,” he said finally. “But you know this will pass. It doesn’t feel like it now, but it will.”
“I know it will,” Thorn said. “It’s already started.”
In tense silence they carted boxes of books from the house to Sugar’s dinged-up Honda. When the car was packed, Sugarman got in, started it, and gave his headlights a farewell flash.
Thorn raised a hand and waved at the lights. It took all his strength.
After Sugar was gone, Thorn decided he was too exhausted to toss more furniture into the fire. He had just enough energy left for his clothes.
That shouldn’t take long. Thorn’s wardrobe consisted of a collection of threadbare cowboy shirts and flowered Hawaiians and T-shirts from local bars and tackle shops. Some shorts and jeans he’d had for thirty years, Jockey shorts so droopy they wouldn’t make decent cleaning rags.
He gathered up the shirts and pants and an armload of socks and gym clothes he’d worn in high school and a black pea jacket Kate had given him when he went away to college in Baltimore. He’d dropped out after only two months, long before it got cold enough to wear the thing. It was heavy and reeked of mildew.
He threw the clothes in the fire. Threw the bedsheets in. Threw in his towels and baseball caps and running shoes and boat shoes and an old Timex Dr. Bill had awarded him at his high school graduation. It was still counting off the seconds when it disappeared into the flames.
Stashed at the bottom of Rusty’s lingerie drawer, he found her father’s Colt .45. When Rusty was five, the tortured man had pressed that pistol to his temple. Somehow he’d only wounded himself with the first shot and managed to pull the trigger a second time before his skull blew apart. A drunk and compulsive womanizer who couldn’t keep a job, he’d beaten Rusty’s mother for as long as Rusty could remember. The two gunshots woke Rusty from a nap and she stumbled outside to find the old man’s body slumped against her swing-set. Her mother kept the pistol and passed it along to Rusty before she died. A ghastly reminder of the man’s final hateful act.
Thorn filled a liquor box with Rusty’s underthings and set the pistol on top and carried it out to the fire. He took out the pistol, checked the magazine to make sure it was loaded, and set it on the ground at his feet, then tossed her silkies into the flames.
He watched them crinkle and turn to smoke, then peeled off his shorts and the gray T-shirt he was wearing and slung them into the fire on top of Rusty’s stuff. Then he stripped off his undershorts and tossed them too. Let their smoke mingle and rise to the sky, and blow away.
Standing naked and barefoot on the soft grass, Thorn stared into the blaze where something in the pile was releasing streamers of blue and green and yellow, like bright ribbons intertwined in the yellow flames. Birthday bows and frilly Christmas decorations coiling into the dark.
A breeze carried the smoke away and his lungs filled with cleaner air.
He picked up the pistol, lifted it, took aim at the fire.
He fired and fired twice more and then a fourth time and was about to empty the weapon when a car’s headlights swept across the yard and settled on him. Whoever it was flicked on their brights and cut the engine.
Thorn, naked, holding a half-empty pistol, had an audience.
Through the smoke and dazzle of the headlights he made out the car door opening and a shadow stepping out.
“Excuse me, sir. Is everything okay?” A woman’s voice. A stranger.
Thorn said nothing. She reached back into the car and turned off the headlights and walked slowly across the lawn toward the flames. She appeared to be a blocky woman with short hair, wearing trousers and a loose-fitting shirt.
Thorn stepped around the fire.
“I was driving past and heard the gunfire. Everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine. No problem. You can go about your business.”
The woman held her ground, head tipped forward, squinting through the smoky darkness.
“Well, you see, that’s the thing. I think you may be my business.”
“You’re wrong. I’m nobody’s business.”
“Are you Daniel Oliver Thorn?”
He didn’t reply.
“Though I believe people just call you Thorn. Am I in the right place?”
“That’s my name.”
“Whew, I wasn’t sure. It’s so dark out here, no house numbers.”
“It’s the middle of the night. What do you want?”
“Valid question, yes, sir, it certainly is. Actually, I hadn’t meant to stop. My plane got into Miami late, I picked up my rental, drove down to find a motel, then I thought maybe I’d try to find your place to mark the spot for tomorrow. ’Cause that was my intention, to drop by at a decent hour. But I saw the fire, heard gunshots. No way I could drive on.”
“What is this?”
“You’re the husband of the late Rachel Anne Stabler, known as Rusty?”
Thorn was silent. His body had hardened, lips too stiff to speak.
“I’ve caught you at an awkward moment. Buck naked, firing a pistol into a bonfire. Maybe it’s normal around here. What you folks do in the Keys, a ritual or whatever. I heard things down here get a little strange. But sir, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable putting on a pair of pants? Setting that pistol on the ground. I know I’d be more easy.”
There was something wrong with her face. He couldn’t make it out in the flickering firelight, bad acne scars or burns.
“What’s your name?”
“Well, okay, since I’m here, I guess we could do this now if you want.”
“I asked your name.”
“All right. My name’s Buddha. Buddha Hilton.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“No, sir, I’m not doing that. That’s my given name. It’s strange, yeah. My old man was a New Age lunatic. Buddha was a big deal to him.”
“Stand over here where I can see you.”
He motioned with Rusty’s .45, and the young woman complied, stepping to her left. She had her hands clasped behind her back like a monk in prayerful contemplation.
“Mr. Thorn, you’re going to have to put that weapon down. I’m a police officer, and having a gun pointed at me, well, that’s something I can’t abide.”
“You’re no police officer.”
“Well, yes, sir, actually I am. But I assure you, you’re not in any trouble. Certainly nothing that would warrant a shootout.”
She smiled at him, but when he didn’t return it, hers melted away.
He couldn’t place her drawl. Ozarks, perhaps, or maybe rural West.
“You’re not old enough to be a cop.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“Like I said. You’re no cop. Now get out of here.”
“Yes, sir, it’s true, I’m a bit young. Still, where I’m from it’s legal age, and nobody wanted the job. Small town, low pay, not much action. But my fellow citizens knew I had an interest in law enforcement, so hell, they got together and elected me.”
“Where is that
? The place you’re from?”
She was silent. She drifted a couple of steps to the right, taking a soft angle in his direction. Arms still behind her back like she was cuffed.
“Most people never heard of my dinky town. Just two stoplights, a cowboy bar, a Dairy Queen, and a Dollar General. But maybe you know it, because your wife, Ms. Stabler, was born there. Starkville, Oklahoma.”
SIX
THORN WAS DIGESTING THAT, WATCHING her take another step his way.
“Look, Mr. Thorn, before we get any farther along, you’re going to need to set that weapon down.”
“If I don’t?”
“I don’t believe we want to explore that alternative.”
“You’re here on official business?”
“Call it half and half. Official, and personal.”
“Forget it,” Thorn said. “You got a problem, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Take it somewhere else. Get out of here. I don’t want any part of this. I’ve had two lifetimes of problems already.”
“I understand. You lost your wife, you’re mourning.”
“You hear me? Get out of here now. Go haul your ass back to Oklahoma. I don’t want anything you’re selling.”
She stepped closer to Thorn by a few more inches. Her face rippled in the firelight. Pale skin etched with black squiggles.
“That’s it,” Thorn said. “Cop or no cop.”
He raised the pistol. Only to turn her around and get her headed to her car. To show her how serious he was. This was his land; she was trespassing.
He saw the first muzzle flash then heard a roar, and another blast and one more after that. His right hand bucked, and on its own, his arm flew straight up in the air like some eager schoolkid waving for attention.
A whanging pain erupted in his hand as if he’d been hammered with a sledge. Thorn stumbled to his right, his shoulder numb. Rusty’s pistol, her dad’s suicide gun, was tumbling through the grass.
“Okay, now,” she said. “Are we cool?”
“You shot that out of my goddamn hand.”
“Didn’t give me much choice.”
“In the dark.”
“Firelight helped. It wasn’t that tough a shot.”
“You missed twice and kept shooting.”
“Missed three times actually.”
“Christ, you could’ve blown my hand off.”
“I factored that in.”
“That’s from some half-assed cowboy movie.”
Stepping closer, wary, her pistol raised, a .38.
“Movie gunslingers get it on the first try. This was a little messier than I would’ve liked.”
Thorn’s chest was hammering. The ash from the fire stung his eyes and his throat burned with its bitter taste.
“Isn’t much crime around Starkville, so I spend a good bit of time out at the shooting range. I got a good eye and a steady aim.”
Thorn tried to work his fingers.
“Not steady enough.”
“Probably should ice that hand,” she said. “Gonna get puffy and sore. Could’ve broken something. Can you move your fingers?”
“You’ve done that a lot, have you?”
“No, sir. You’re my first. Pictured it a few times, but never had sufficient provocation.”
She smiled and the firelight lit up her cheeks. They were covered by strange black hieroglyphics.
Thorn tried to make a fist but couldn’t close the hand. No fractures but an ache rooted deep in the tissues.
“There’s ice,” he said. “Inside.”
In the laundry room off the kitchen, Thorn found a bath towel and wrapped it around his waist. He ran cold water over his hand while Buddha scooped ice cubes from the freezer and dumped them into a mixing bowl. She stayed at arm’s length, pistol at the ready.
When the bowl was full, Thorn slid his throbbing hand among the cubes and examined the woman in the kitchen lights. Her bangs were ragged across her forehead, the hair butchered on top in no discernible style, and on both sides of her head she was shaved to the scalp. It was as bad a haircut as he’d ever seen, as if she’d barbered herself during a seizure. She had a soft oval face and wide-set dark eyes, a small chin, pretty mouth. Though all of that was hard to make out clearly through the hundreds of tiny markings that were lined up in parallel rows across the pale flesh of her cheeks and forehead like a battalion of insects marching into battle.
“Tattoos,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
Thorn hadn’t been a fan of tats until Rusty converted him. She had an elegant pink butterfly tribal design inked at the base of her spine, just above her rump, a drawing that Thorn never tired of tracing with his fingertips. It was their own erogenous zone. An elaborate and artful G-spot.
Folks like Rusty with two or three tattoos were simply marking themselves with the sacred symbols of their beliefs. Exercising their individuality. But serious tattoo junkies, the ones who covered themselves from head to toe, were a different breed. To them the hot scratch of the needle became a chemical addiction, and their swirly, colorful designs covering every inch of arms and legs and backs and torsos were topographic maps of their pain.
Rusty believed their secret goal was to disappear behind the murals of embedded ink, to divert the eyes of onlookers to the artwork and away from the sad disclosures of their faces.
But even in the world of tattoo freaks, this young woman was an extreme case. The outlandish tats that disfigured her cheeks and forehead and chin were like a veil drawn across her features, all but hiding her from view.
“Okay, you have my attention,” he said. “Ask your questions, then go.”
“Thank you.”
She took her time. Ambled around the kitchen, appraising the ancient appliances, the tile countertops, the pickled wood cabinetry. Still with the pistol in her hand, she touched a fingertip to a line of grout and traced its straight edge down the length of the counter.
“I’m investigating the homicide of Michaela Stabler.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Rusty never mentioned the name?”
“Why would she?”
At the side window she halted her tour of the kitchen and stared outside at the bonfire’s dying flames.
While she was distracted, Thorn quietly slipped his hand from the bowl of ice and stepped around the counter. He eased behind her, eyes on the pistol held loosely in her hand. He didn’t know if she was a cop or not. He didn’t know who the hell she was. But she was a stranger, and she was inside his house with a revolver in her hand, and in Thorn’s view, that was unacceptable.
He set his feet, timed his move, then snapped his left hand for the gun. But the young woman was wound tighter than she appeared. She slid to her right, chopped the edge of her free hand against his wrist, and danced out of range. She brought the pistol up again to sight on Thorn’s face.
“Dude, you’re getting old and slow.”
Thorn held his ground.
“And so predictable,” she said. “Rash and brash just like she said.”
“Who said?”
“Rusty Stabler, your wife.”
“What the hell do you know about Rusty?”
“I know a good bit about her, and way too much about you.”
She was studying him intently as if trying to match his face to some image in her head.
“You don’t know shit.”
“Okay, for one thing,” she said, “I know you’ve been living off the grid since before there even was a grid.”
Thorn tightened the towel around his waist.
“I know you punched the ticket for at least half a dozen people over the years. Always for some righteous cause, of course, or in self-defense. Maybe the people you took down were bad guys, maybe they weren’t, but any way you look at it, you’ve got serious blood on your hands.”
Thorn stepped back to the counter and looked around at the bare room.
“I also know that for the last twenty years, you’ve been a party to
one disaster after another. People around you die on a regular basis.
“I know you had a steady stream of women in and out of your bedroom. And hardly any of those ladies came to a good end. All in all, you’ve put together an impressive list of fuck-ups.”
She stared coolly into his eyes the way Sugarman did when speaking some hard truth. It was a cop thing, that disengagement, a necessary discipline in police work—the way they insulated themselves from all the crazed morons they had to deal with, ones who’d lost contact with reason and moral clarity. Cops tended to go far off in the other direction, becoming coldly rational, neutral, rulebook bound. At least on the outside.
“I also know you tie some kind of fishing lures that you sell to a bunch of fussy fishermen. The cash that brings in just gets you by. And I know you don’t have a social security card or a driver’s license or any kind of legal ID. You graduated from high school but dropped out of college like you dropped out of pretty much everything. Don’t socialize, keep to yourself, a hermit, push everybody away except your private eye buddy Sugarman and an occasional lucky lady. Or at least they think they’re lucky at first. Until they’re dead because of you.”
“That’s enough,” Thorn said.
“I also know the only reason you legally married Rusty Stabler was ’cause she was dying of stage-four pancreatic cancer and you thought it would make her happy to be married. And it did. It made her damn happy. So mark up one success. You made Rusty Stabler happy for a month. Thank god for that.”
Thorn was silent. Peering at her, trying to see past that mask of tats.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Thorn, but now that I have a firsthand look, I believe I’m beginning to get the real picture. Here you are, all tragic and tender and starry-eyed, with your sandy hair and your square jaw and blue Romeo eyes. Which helps explain all those good-hearted, innocent women falling onto your mattress.
“But we both know there’s another guy inside, a wild-eyed screwup with a taste for risk and ruination. Just so happens, I spent years studying your type. Mind you, it wasn’t because I particularly wanted to.
“My own daddy played your game. A charmer who came across as decent and moral, as upright as any man you ever met. Everything dark and twisted he did always started out with noble intentions.
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